Devon and Cornwall Polar Society

DEVON AND CORNWALL POLAR SOCIETY

Lecture held on 21 March 2013 at the Royal Corinthian Yacht Club, Plymouth

This was a well attended lecture delivered by Dr Adrian Fox, Head of the Mapping and Geographic Information Centre (MAGIC) of the British Antarctic Survey, Cambridge.

Dr Fox was introduced by John Killingbeck who informed the meeting that Dr Fox had been a FID for many years and had recently climbed the tallest mountain in the Antarctic Peninsula - Mount Jackson - which made him (John Killingbeck) extremely envious!

Dr Fox commenced his talk by providing an outline profile of the BAS Headquarters in Cambridge. 415 staff are employed there and an annual budget of £44 million is allocated from the National Environmental Research Council for maintenance of BAS and its operations. BAS is unique in that it has a dual role of providing UK presence in the Antarctic and is a logistics operation but also a research institute of considerable reputation in its own right. Increasingly, it is also acting as a logistics operation for supporting university teams. Other points include the following:

. The British Antarctic Sector extends between 20° and 80° west and extends as far north as South Georgia.

. There are two ships: James Clark Ross and the Shackleton ; four ski-equipped Twin Otters and one Intercontinental Dash-7 aircraft.

. To give some idea of scale the Antarctic Peninsula, if placed alongside the tip of Scotland, would stretch down to northern Spain as its European equivalent area.

. Four Stations, Bird Island, King Edward Point, Rothera and Halley, are operated throughout the year. During the summer months biological research is carried out at Signy and there are two manned staging depots during the summer at Fossil Bluff (Alexander Island) and Sky-Blue (Eastern Ellsworth Land).

. Since its inception BAS has occupied 19 research stations. The stations no longer in use are managed according to the Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty. BAS also operates Ny-Alesund Research Station in the Antarctic on behalf of the NERC.

Dr Fox gave a brief outline of the permanent bases. He described how Sky-Blue was an absolutely flat plane of blue ice upon which the planes could land using a normal undercarriage and how visitors coming down onto the ice for the first time from the aircraft would frequently fall over, giving rise to an injury known as 'Sky-Blue bottom'. He described Halley 6, recently completed, as ‘the transportable base’. Altogether the operational footprint of the British Antarctic Survey is about a quarter of the continent.

MAGIC was formed shortly after the British Antarctic Survey took over from the Falkland Island Dependencies Survey (FIDS) and as a consequence has access to data going back into the 1940s at the time of Operation Tabarin during the War. The organisation is a very active member of the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research and its role is to provide mapping support for the scientific work carried out by BAS and others.

Dr Fox showed some of the maps which have proved most popular. The maps produced from his department are considered the most definitive and are certainly the most popular across the globe. For example, in the International Polar Year they sold over one thousand special maps and following 'Life in the Freezer' his department sold one million maps. The Foreign and Commonwealth Office is particularly keen on British Antarctic Survey maps, for obvious reasons.

He then demonstrated the complexity of international relationships and collaborations. On the South Shetland Islands, for example, there are more than 20 representatives of different nations. The Antarctic Place Names Committee control the nomenclature and this is managed by MAGIC on its behalf. For example. considerations such as not duplicating name and unifying names into a singleton where in the past several may have been applied. MAGIC has been managing mapping activities for SCAR since 1993. To provide an illustration of scale, whereas the ¼ million scale maps need 63 projections to cover the Peninsula, four will cover the UK.

Air operations form a major part of their duties at present. Some of the detail they are able to add is extremely useful to pilots. For example, inserting flight tracks and annotating these with the flight time at 130 knots and the estimated fuel burn in pounds has made life much easier for pilots. The unit aims to work with others to achieve uniform mapping standards. The potential benefits for this can be seen in a recent tragedy where two pilots lost their lives in the crash of a Dash 7 in new Zealand Antarctic territory.

Ice maps / satellite imagery are also increasingly important. They can obviate many flying operations and can help in such diverse activities as rescue missions to monitoring expeditions i.e. the recent Scott Centennial Expedition, which used the sea ice data to plan its route into the Antarctic.

Aerial photography. This is the mainstay of mapping operations. In 2013 they acquired a DMC digital camera having only just now switched from recording on to film, which is no longer available.

Dr Fox spent some time comparing and contrasting aerial v. satellite imaging properties. Although the raw satellite images do not have the resolution to distinguish individual items as small as, say, penguins (10cm resolution from aerial photography) digital manipulation can be used to give a pretty fair estimates of numbers. The unit has been using near infra red images since 1996 which means they are not dependent on cloud cover and the weather.

He went on to describe the glacier and ice shelf work. Sequential aerial views provide stereo coverage over a lengthy period and can be compared with unique archive photographs (a new role for historic photos) since the 1940s to show that the Northern Ice is reducing as the 9° isotherm moves south. Looking at 60 glaciers from these photos and going back to Tabarin material, shows that approximately 80% of the glaciers on the Peninsula have retreated on average by about two kilometres during this period.

The MAGIC help desk series - for example last year 220 enquiries were handled per year, anything from whale catch data to mapping the entirety of Emperor penguin colonies. Here they found the 37 known colonies and an additional 20 new ones, which had not previously been identified. The Emperor Penguin total is reckoned to be 600,000.

The Bed Map 2 series, charts the rock surface under the ice and this is carried out in collaboration with 30 other bodies to provide for analysis a total of 207 different surveys. This involves handling 26 million residual survey points and 25 other complementary data sets. Using the surface height mapping data gives the volume of ice in the Antarctic by subtraction and he felt that these new findings will make the news during the next few weeks. If the entire volume of ice were to be melted there would be a rise in the surface sea levels of 58 metres. He provided other interesting statistics.

The future - aerial photography is good but satellite activity, e.g. satellite pairing and radar altimetry, will become increasingly important.

Quick bird resolution is improving and almost as good as aerial photography now.

Satellite pairing is carried out by Sterco 5AR Tandem-X equipment.

Demand for delivering digital data over the web rather than in the form of maps, is increasing. He illustrated the capabilities of satellite mapping by showing the Stromness base on South Georgia in detail.

He referred to 'Queen Elizabeth Land' for the Millennium and concluded with a plea to support the continuance of the BAS as a unique national and international research resource rather than becoming a logistics operation for short-term and disparate university projects, as some in NERC have recently proposed.

Dr Chris Andrews paid tribute to the work of BAS and Magic and proposed the vote of thanks to Dr. Fox for an informative and excellent lecture.